Jonathan Fernandes, president of Green Amber, received an earful Thursday afternoon, January 31, as more than 100 residents gathered to listen (and respond!) to his public presentation and meeting, mandated by the Regional District.

Green Amber, an Ontario company, is seeking permission to pour more than 100,000 sq ft of concrete as a base for their planned industrial marijuana production facility on Shafer Road in rural Lumby.

When I wrote the article below I had not realized the extent of the ravages to rural areas that are inherent in the 2014 Canada-China Cherry Agreement. In order to grow the industry as much as predicted growers buy land in areas that are "suitable" only because deafening equipment such as helicopters and fans are used, making life unlivable for neighbours and because constant spraying pollute the air, water and nearby crops.

The 2014 agreement plans to cover the Okanagan (see map attachment) with industrial cherry orchards, although government acknowledges that growing cherries industrially conflicts with life in the Okanagan. This was admitted in the report written last week during the BC Farm Industry Review Board in Vernon where two complainants asked for a reduction of the incessant noise emitted from a Lavington orchard. See report and closing document of complainants below where they argue that this is NOT normal farming.

A recent article in the Prince George Daily News entitled “Death from the sky in Northern BC” included pictures of a wetland, green and abundant with plants, insects, amphibians, birds and mammals and “the same wetland gripped by a grey death after being sprayed from helicopters with the herbicide glyphosate.”

Those images were from a recent meeting at UNBC entitled “Starving moose, burning forests and contaminated blueberries: a case for broadleaves and a new paradigm in Central British Columbia”. Glyphosate is sprayed on 10,000 to 20,000 hectares of forests yearly resulting in over 1.3 million hectares having been affected since 1980.

Once they come, forget about your peace of mind, clean air and water, seeing birds and wildlife and selling your property. You won't want to stay in it and nobody in their right mind will want to buy it. All it takes is one in an area to make properties unsalable and turn a lovely rural community into an area that sounds like a war zone and is unfit to live. Industrial cherry orchardists are on the lookout for cheap land and climate change is now making it possible to use land further north.

A new wave of gene-edited crops are dodging regulators, and they’re about to reach stores.

by Antonio Regalado - MIT Technology Review - December 19, 2017

When I visited Jason McHenry’s farm in South Dakota, the young farmer, dressed in worn jeans and sunglasses, led me up a slippery steel ladder on the side of a grain bin. We tumbled through the manhole into a shifting mountain of soybeans. You could sift them through your fingers and taste their sweet, cloudy flavor.

The U.S. soybean crop is four billion bushels a year, about 240 billion pounds. It generates the most cash receipts for American farms after cattle and corn. Of those beans, more than 90 percent are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs—that is, they’ve been genetically enhanced, most often through the addition of a gene from a soil bacterium that renders them immune to the weed killer glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup.

(Beyond Pesticides, December 13, 2017) A recent study finds that environmental exposures contribute to increasing disease burden and corresponding health costs that may exceed 10% of global gross domestic product (GDP). Neurological impairments particularly add significant costs to both individuals and societies. This European study combined cost calculations for exposures to environmental chemicals, including pesticides, air pollution, and endocrine disrupting substances, and suggests that a shift in priority setting for environmental policy is needed.